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EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

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Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#201

Post by e12e »

trinovantes wrote: post #160
neilv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case anyone is inspired to do related things, I made a mistake once (troubling and embarrassing), which I'll mention in case it helps someone else avoid my mistake... In earlier days of the Web, someone appeared to have hotlinked a photo from a page of mine, as their avatar/signature in some Web forum for another country, and it was eating up way too much bandwidth for my little site. I handled this in an annoyed…

Some Japanese porn makers avoid getting pirated in China by placing politically sensitive content in the backgrounds

Wasn't there news about police officers playing music in order for videos of them triggering automated copyright/DMCA takedowns?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxb94/is-this-beverly-hills...

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#202

Post by braingenious »

trinovantes wrote: post #182
braingenious wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds hilarious! Do you have a link to any articles about this practice?

Found these old articles but I'm not sure if this is a widespread practice https://news-ltn-com-tw.translate.goog/news/world/breakingne... (nsfw) https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/japan-piracy-09252022...

Thanks! That’s such a clever idea

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#203

Post by chrismeller »

lolinder wrote: post #188
chrismeller wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except neither of those would help in this case. They’re already using their own domain name, and it’s unclear how they would even build their own CDN since they’re using that scale of bandwidth - AdGuard said they’re still pushing 100tb of access denied pages a month for their similar case. That is a LOT of bandwidth just for access denied messages.

Their point isn't that EasyList could have done anything differently, their point is that they are glad that they didn't decide to rely on others' infrastructure for their own ad blocker, because that makes them resilient against the fallout from this and similar.

Except it wouldn’t make them resilient since, as I pointed out, neither of the things they did would be of any help at all to Easylist in this situation.

It’s great that they’re happy with their choices, but the choices would, in this same situation, likely saddle them with a crippled infrastructure and/or some insane bandwidth bills for suddenly pushing 100 extra TB/m.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#204

Post by sershe »

Since they added "Access denied" for misbehaving browsers, can they instead serve them some sort of bad response that will "surface" issue to the users? Depending on what would work better and cost less... (1) a small list that would block major legitimate sites. Whoops, the browser is unusable, now users complain to the developer to fix the issue, or abandon it. (2) "hang" the request if the browser loads the list synchronously; blocking UI thread is a hallmark of a bad developer, so they might (3) stream /dev/zero. Might be expensive; maybe serve a compressed zip-bomb if HTTP spec allows and/or browsers will process it?

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#205

Post by rvnx »

jannyfer wrote: post #149
rvnx wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These apps behind cannot render the captcha, as the fetch is happening in the background. However what you can do is match the user-agents, and return a global/catch-all adblocking rule that blocks all the content of all the pages (by blocking the body element). The app developers are going to notice the issue very fast (because users are reporting the problem), and mirroring the lists or adding a cache is immediatel…

Blocking all page content to knowingly cause unintended behavior… I wonder if this can be considered criminal. I read that poisoning your own lunch to catch a workplace fridge thief could be considered assault. EDIT: here’s what I read. https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/966/can-one-be-liabl... Imagine, say, you update the list to block all URLs, and it impacts some municipal government worker’s ability to updat…

I don't think so. Google often knowingly and intentionally breaks apps (through API deprecation) because it's more convenient for them or that it is costly to maintain. Nothing criminal there.

Same for Easylist, if they decide that a quota of 100000 requests per IP+UA per day is the maximum, that's their choice. They owe nothing to the consumers of the lists.

That being said; Easylist actually benefits from being distributed in many apps; it is really valuable to influence / control adblocking lists, so the more flexible they are to the browser developers, the better (I guess).

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#206

Post by pseudosavant »

pwinnski wrote: post #186
pseudosavant wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, but only via a repo.

I'm curious, if an arbitrary GitHub repo suddenly started attracting hundreds of terabytes of egress, violating GitHub's ToS, would GitHub manage traffic in coordination with the repo's owner, or would they disable the repo and suspend the account? I suspect the latter. I don't know how to make a repo public but limit web traffic to it. Do you?

I could see disabling viewing raw links. But if the repo becomes popular to fork what would GH do? The friction of using git instead of HTTP will prevent 99.9% of hotlinking. So it probably couldn’t become too popular.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#207

Post by e12e »

bombcar wrote: post #4

If I recall correctly there was some image on wikipedia that was getting billions of downloads a day or something, all from India, because some smart phone had made it a default "hello" image and hot linked it. Unfortunately, I can't find a reference to it anymore.

One could take some inspiration and simply rotate the image(s) - like in the case of wifi leeches:

https://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#208

Post by r3trohack3r »

Spunkie wrote: post #172
bombcar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. The key is "as viewed through a web browser" imo, this is not really an API and it's not a webpage; it's a datafile and would fall into R2 or simi…

Why do people keep talking like you can't just navigate to a txt file in your browser and have it serve as any old web content? Which is something I have actually done many years ago to search for a domain in these types of lists. Cloudflare is balancing on a razer for this TOS technicality.

The TOS aren’t referring to content-type headers, magic bytes, TCP headers, browser support of file formats, or any technical implementation.

To oversimplify, they’re saying Cloudflare’s service is to be used for serving websites to browsers.

Serving a static text file that is primarily used by applications is not in line with their terms of service.

Cloudflare provides a significant service to the free and open web by subsidizing the hosting costs of static content for websites. They give that away for free under what appears to be reasonable terms. I’m not sure why you’re trying to “gotcha” through their ToS.

It would be great if Cloudflare would donate resources to EasyList - it would do a lot to help the free and open internet by giving users more power over what gets delivered to their browser. But call that what it is: a donation.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#209

Post by numpad0 »

trinovantes wrote: post #182
braingenious wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds hilarious! Do you have a link to any articles about this practice?

Found these old articles but I'm not sure if this is a widespread practice https://news-ltn-com-tw.translate.goog/news/world/breakingne... (nsfw) https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/japan-piracy-09252022...

Widespread in the sense that social media users have done it for long time, and Chinese users are sometimes counteracting by rewriting those into pro-regime phrases, but not what considered safe for commercial entities to exploit. That one is not a professionally produced film.

1: https://news-infoseek-co-jp.translate.goog/article/president... (og: https://news.infoseek.co.jp/article/president_61325/ )

2: https://i.imgur.com/5hjqu3L.jpg (label on bottle and window sign)

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#210

Post by girvo »

chrismeller wrote: post #203
lolinder wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their point isn't that EasyList could have done anything differently, their point is that they are glad that they didn't decide to rely on others' infrastructure for their own ad blocker, because that makes them resilient against the fallout from this and similar.

Except it wouldn’t make them resilient since, as I pointed out, neither of the things they did would be of any help at all to Easylist in this situation. It’s great that they’re happy with their choices, but the choices would, in this same situation, likely saddle them with a crippled infrastructure and/or some insane bandwidth bills for suddenly pushing 100 extra TB/m.

It was never suggested that what the original commenter was doing would help EasyList.
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